As personal computers (PCs) become increasingly prevalent in home and office environments, computer users and administrators are becoming increasingly concerned about the time, effort and expense required to maintain each computer. Indeed, the lifetime cost of maintaining a computer frequently exceeds the cost of purchasing the computer by at least an order of magnitude or more.
With reference to FIG. 1, a typical computer system 100 includes hardware 102 such as a processor, network interface, a keyboard, a mouse, a monitor and the like. Applications 108 suitably communicate with the hardware to perform various functions through operating system 106. If applications 108 include network functionality, a network interface 104 typically receives network calls from the application 108 via operating system 106 and relays them as appropriate to network hardware included with hardware 108. An exemplary network interface includes the network design interface specification (NDIS) available from the Microsoft™ Corporation of Redmond, Wash., although of course other network interfaces could be used in conjunction with various operating systems and hardware configurations.
As can be appreciated, all aspects of computer system 100 are susceptible to failure, error, or the need for upgrade. Operating system components, for example, may be accidentally modified, moved or deleted by a user. Similarly, network drivers or application programs can become corrupted. Accordingly, an ideal administration program would be able to perform administrative tasks, repairs and upgrades on all aspects of the computer system 100. Such functionality typically requires, however, that the administrative tool operates even if the network layer 104, operating system 106 or application layer 108 is not available.
Although various administration tools have existed in the past, these tools have exhibited one or more marked disadvantages. The Intellimirror™ product available from the Microsoft Corporation of Redmond, Wash., for example, operates at the application level 108. Similarly, the Norton Utilities™ and Norton Ghost™ programs available from the Symantec Corporation of Cupertino, Calif. operate at application level 108. Because these programs operate at the application level, their proper execution requires that hardware 102, network layer 104 and operating system 106 be available and functional. If any of these layers 102, 104 or 106 are damaged or otherwise unavailable, the administrative program will not typically function properly.
Conventional administrative programs frequently exhibit further disadvantages in that they typically function on a standalone PC, and as such are not suitable for use in a distributed, networked environment as required by most present day office environments. Distributed administration of networked PCs is desirable because it is frequently cumbersome or inconvenient for support personnel to physically go to the computer to run administrative programs and to execute administrative tasks. Moreover, when an administrator wishes to upgrade or change a particular configuration element on a multitude of PCs, it is often necessary to physically make changes or upgrades on each individual PC. Such a task generally requires a large amount of overhead in terms of time, effort and money.
It is therefore desirable to create a method, system and apparatus to administer, maintain and upgrade computers from a central location. Moreover, it is desirable to maintain and repair these computers even if problems exist with the computer's operating system or network interface.